Despite the marked disparity in the number of treatment sessions and the duration of treatment, CBT was more effective in relieving binging and purging than psychoanalytic psychotherapy and was generally faster in alleviating eating disorder features and general psychopathology. The findings indicate the need to develop and test a more structured and symptom-focused version of psychoanalytic psychotherapy for bulimia nervosa.

No abstract

The present study evaluates the severity of neurocognitive deficits and assesses their relations with self-reported childhood trauma and dimensions of personality psychopathology in 45 outpatients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) matched to 56 non-psychiatric controls. Participants completed a comprehensive battery of neurocognitive tests, a retrospective questionnaire on early life trauma and a dimensional measure of personality psychopathology. Patients with BPD primarily showed deficits in verbal comprehension, sustained visual attention, working memory and processing speed. Comorbid posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and an elevated childhood history of physical trauma were each accompanied by more severe neurocognitive deficits. There were no statistically significant associations between neurocognitive function and dimensions of personality psychopathology. These results suggest that patients with BPD display deficits mainly in higher-order thinking abilities that may be exacerbated by PTSD and substantial early life trauma. Potential relationships between neurocognitive deficits and dimensions of personality psychopathology in BPD need further examination.

This study compares maladaptive coping, measured as substance use, behavioral disengagement, self-blame, and emotional eating, among adults (>18 years) who have experienced early parental loss ( N = 1465 women, N = 331 men) with non-bereaved controls ( N = 515 women, N = 115 men). We also compared bereaved adults who received grief counseling ( N = 822 women, N = 190 men) with bereaved controls who had not ( N = 233 women, N = 66 men). Bereaved adults reported significantly more substance use, behavioral disengagement, and emotional eating than non-bereaved adults. Counseling participants reported significantly more substance use and self-blame than non-participants. Our results suggest that early loss may negatively impact the development of adulthood coping.

Individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) frequently display impairments in the identification of emotional facial expressions paralleled by a negativity bias. However, it remains unclear whether misperception of facial expressions is a key psychopathological marker of BPD. To address this question, the authors examined 43 women diagnosed with BPD and 56 healthy female controls using an emotion face identification task and a face dot-probe task together with measures on psychopathology. Compared to controls, women with BPD showed impaired identification of disgusted and angry faces concurrent with a bias to misclassify faces as angry, and a faster preconscious vigilance for fearful relative to happy facial expressions. Increased severity of borderline symptoms and global psychopathology in BPD patients were associated with reduced ability to identify angry facial expressions and a stronger negativity bias to anger. The findings indicate that BPD patients who misperceive face emotions have the greatest mental health issues.